Inspired by Walther Becks ivy on cornucopia3d I have started work on a house covered by ivy. I have modelled the house on one from Tosterup, Skane in Sweden, and have created an ivy plant using a picture of an ivy leaf and editing the spring hollyhock plant.

Each of the ivy leaves has a different color tone to add some variety, its starting to look a bit better but I really want to get the texture on the house to look more weatherbeaten.

This is a partial review of E-on softwares Vue 7 Complete. It is only partial becuase at present I am only able to work on a lower specification computer (although still higher than the minimum specification) than I previously worked with Vue 6 Pro Studio on, having just moved to Sweden.

Firstly although like everyone else who bought Vue 7 Complete, I was forced to wait for a couple of days in order to be able to sync my copy with Cornucopia 3D, this will not influence my judgement of the program overall. Servers can and will crash at the worst possible time.

I will try to cover several areas with this review, stability, rendering, and new features.

Stability

Like its predecessors, Vue 7 complete suffers from a number of stability problems, (from my experience and that of the users of E-on softwares forums.

As I am using a slightly older computer than I will be in a couple of weeks time it will remain to be seen if this is purely the reason for the number of crashes I have encountered. Often when I start Vue I am faced with an instant crash and a message telling me that I should send a service note to the technicians at E-on software When I open the software again I am told that the program has recovered from a serious crash and that I should use Software Open GL drivers instead of hardware.

This is then followed by a message telling me that a save of my previous work was made, which is highly unstable, opening this file reveals a blank file (obviously). This leads to a good new feature though. Vue 7 Complete doesnt give you a slightly patronizing error message of “save your work and hope for the best”, it automatically saves a copy, which is then opened the next time the software opens. And as a bonus, so far, it has worked every time.

The software runs a lot slower on this computer than Vue 6 Pro Studio does, this I understand, is a greater reliance on the Graphics Card which means on a more powerful computer, theoretically, it should be more stable, with less OOM issues. (This will be reported when possible)

It should be noted that downloading items from Cornucopia 3D still doesnt work properly.

Rendering

Rendering is a lot faster in Vue 7 Complete, then in Vue 6 Pro Studio, noticeably so. It should also be noted that it renders in a different style to the Vues of old. Non technically speaking, from side to side, rather than up in strips. This means that areas of your render are completed quicker enabling you to see changes that need to be made quicker.

New Features

New features of note are the water editor, and excellent feature which is written about elsewhere on this site, and the ecopainter tool, which more will be written about later.

It should be noted that in this pre release version, a couple of features appear to be missing from the specification sheet. The ability to import skp files has been mentioned on E-on softwares forums. And the plant editor is exactly the same as of that in Vue 6 Pro Studio.

Vue 7′s editor is top, Vue 6 is below it.

The only extra buttons are the “reaction to wind” setting and the “export plant” options which are the result of an upgrade from Pro Studio to Complete.

Conclusion

Although this review probalby appears to be all doom and gloom, this is still a stunning product. Hopefully when the first patch is released or when product is officially released (not as a pre-release) the problems with stability and apparently missing components will be rectified.

The water editor and ecopainter alone make it worth the upgrade, although many people will probalby be put off by the fairly prohibitive upgrade price from Vue 6 Pro Studio.

A further review will be entered when I am able to test the program fully with a more powerful computer.

Another simple creation using Vue 7 Complete and its great EcoPainter tool for a little bit of festive fun. Firstly we need to creat a snowy christmas tree, which will be done by adding a fir tree, then copying it and pasting it over and changing the leaf colour and trunk to white, an idea I came across on the Cornucopia3D forums

Now we need to model a bauble. This will be done in hexagon 2.5, a software by Daz3D by manipulating a sphere object.

The baubles then need to be texured in vue 7 complete, so that they can be used in the ecopainter. In this case i will be using the standard “Red Metal” and “Bronze” Textures so it is nice and shiny for the tree.

Then the ecopainter tool will be used, single instance, with the bauble object selected in order to be able to place the objects on the tree.

Place a cone around the christmas tree in order to paint the instances onto a surface, this will be deleted later. Once all the baubles have been added, delete the cylinder and render the image. (It is also possible to paint the instances directly onto the tree)

For more information on these techniques or to buy the bauble model ($1) please contact me